As an LSAT instructor, I teach argument for a living, and because of that, I’ve become the most annoying Facebook friend ever. Rather than just jumping right into the NFL national anthem controversy, I’ve decided to use this issue as a test case for how to argue properly. This is the fifth post in a series, so click here for more background on the NFL national anthem debate, here for an explanation of arguments and assumptions, here for a study on definitions, and here for straw men and ad hominem arguments.

Numbers never lie, but they mislead on a regular basis. Take this famous and politically neutral example:

4 out of 5 dentists recommend our toothpaste!

First, consider how many dentists were surveyed. If the toothpaste company only asked 5 dentists, 4 out of 5 seems like a reasonable response, but if the company asked 1,000 dentists, and 200 dentists said not to use the toothpaste, I’m not using that toothpaste.

Next, how were the actual survey questions phrased? Were these dentists asked if they would recommend the toothpaste or if they would recommend the toothpaste over another brand? This distinction drastically affects how the dentists might answer.

Lastly, always look for the lurking variable— an unstated factor that may skew the data. Is there some other reason 4 out of 5 dentists agree? Maybe all 5 dentists went to high school with the toothpaste company’s CEO, or maybe reps from the toothpaste company flattered the dentists to put them in a better mood. This is why data from more neutral entities like the FDA is always preferable.

As we shift our attention back to Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling, let’s assume that the data on police shootings is collected accurately. How can accurate data still be misleading? Well, it’s all in how you spin it.

Critics of the Black Lives Matter movement regularly cite FBI and Washington Post data on police shootings, which show more white people are killed by police each year than black people. There’s a problem though: this data, while factually correct, isn’t adjusted to reflect percentages. At the time of this data’s collection, America was 62% white and 13% black, so when you adjust the data to reflect the different population sizes, black Americans are killed by police officers at more than twice the rate of white Americans. The disparity is even more extreme (roughly 5-to-1) when you limit the data to shootings of unarmed men. And so, the police kill more white people each year, and black Americans are at greater risk than white Americans. For better or for worse, how you interpret this data often depends on your mindset going into it.

Then there’s the idea of “black-on-black crime.” While I try to stay polite in any discussion, I go ahead and correct people when I hear this phrase. When you look at homicide data, the trend isn’t “black people keep killing each other!” Rather, people tend to kill people who live near them, and as our country is still largely segregated, that means black people kill other black people at roughly the same rate that white people kill other white people. Black people are no more uniquely fatal toward one another than white people are toward one another.

I also hear complaints that the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t address inner city crime. Well, yeah. Obviously. Black Lives Matter is a single-issue movement focuing on police brutality. Criticizing Black Lives Matter for not taking on inner city crime is like complaining that the NRA isn’t addressing wildlife conservation— a few members and committees are working on it, but it’s not the organization’s chief aim, and it doesn’t get much publicity. (Side note: Just because you haven’t heard of something happening, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.) In fact, a lot of the people active in Black Lives Matter also protest violence across the board by participating in nonprofit work and anti-violence demonstrations, and few people exemplify this better than Colin Kaepernick. As a free agent, Kaepernick is using his downtime and his money to help teens and children potentially at risk for inner city violence, so the whole “you’re not addressing inner city crime” thing? That’s not even bad statistics; it’s a bald-faced lie.

Of course, you should read this post with a little skepticism too. You see, I’m not a neutral source either, and like you, I read these numbers with biases lurking in the back of my mind. Biases shape how we interact with data, and while our personal mishandling of a statistic may not have world-shaking consequences, when politicians and pundits misrepresent the numbers, whether willfully or ignorantly… well, you get the NFL debate.

Speaking of spreading falsehoods, next time around, we’ll dive into another phenomenon related to ad hominem attacks: gatekeeping.